men" (a Chinaman being an unorthodox left-arm bowl). Cricket in America puts all this, quite literally, in play. Hans, the white banker, can be only an honorary im- migrant, something that O'Neill ac- knowledges by teasing out the question of Hans's American driving test. It takes him the entirety of the novel to pass it, and he succeeds only at the mo- ment when he no longer needs a li- cense-weeks before his departure. The sort of document that would be crucial to a Chuck Ramkissoon is a bit of a joke to a Hans van den Broek. O'Neill beautifully counterposes the different origins and expectations of these two men, united by cricket: the upper-class Hans, who can come and go in America on a banker's whim, and is paralyzed by the expensive torpor of his marital woes, and the modest Trin- idadian, dynamic with designs, ever eager to be grounded in America. Chuck is excited by Hans's Dutchness, and compliments him, in his usual showy way, on being, after the Native Ameri- cans, a member of N ew York's "first tribe." This ideological affection arises partly from Chuck's determination to argue for cricket's aboriginal status as the first American sport. The immi- grants playing cricket in New York are the real Americans, the true natives, at once colonials and the first colonists. The colonials want to be colonists; Hans, the ancestral colonist, wants to be a colonial. In the summer of 2003, he is gripped by "real cricket madness." And all this would be abstract if it were not itself grounded by the novel- again, quite literally. Three times O'Neill takes us to Bald Eagle Field. The first time, it is Chuck's snowy dream. The second time, sixty pages later, it is the summer of2003, and Hans is astounded: the field is green and tended. 'j esus," he says to Chuck, "you did it." The colonial has successfully colonized his green breast of America. A hundred pages later, in 2006, Hans has left the States, is reunited with his wife in London, and has heard the news about Chuck's demise. He sits at a computer and uses Coogle Earth to zoom over the old cricket field, and finds that it has browned: There's Chuck's field. It is brown-the grass has burned-but it is still there. There's no trace of a batting square. The equipment shed is gone. I'm just seeing a field. I stare at it for a while. I am contending with a variety of reactions, and consequently with a single brush on the touch pad I flee upward into the atmosphere and at once have in my sights the physical planet, submarine wrin- kles and all-have the option, if so moved, to go anywhere. From up here, though, a human's movement is a barely intelligible thing. Where would he move to, and for what? There is no sign of nations, no sense of the work of man. The USA as such is no- where to be seen. Reflection on what became of Chuck and his cricket dream causes Hans to re- call a recent holiday in India, where he saw a column of poor workers by the side of the road. "They were small and thin and poor and dark-skinned, with thin arms and thin legs. Theywere men walking in the forest and the darkness." For some reason, Hans tells us, he keeps on seeing these men. "I do not think of Chuck as one of them, even though, with his very dark skin, he could have been one of them. I think of Chuck as the Chuck I saw. But whenever I see these men I always end up seeing Chuck." The simplicity of the writing here and the choosing of a frozen racial em- blem echo V. S. Naipaul, that Trinida- dian Indian, and, if "N etherland" pays homage to "The Great Gatsby," it is also in some kind of knowing rela- tionship with "A House for Mr. Bis- was." These are large interlocutors, but "N etherland" has an ideological in tri- cacy, a deep human wisdom, and prose grand enough to dare the comparison. Less desperately than Biswas, less com- ically, too, Chuck is searching for a house, a home, and so is Hans, adrift in a New York at once fascinating and a little estranging. O'Neill has N aipauf s gift for creating unforced novelistic connections in a world of forced ideo- logical connections. And he knows perfectly well that when, on the last pages of his novel, he writes about a memory of Manhattan's skyline and the "extraordinary promise in what we saw' he is hovering, like some novelis- tic Google Earther, over the sentence grids and prose plateaus of the last page of "The Great Gatsby." He knows, as some of us had forgotten, that the last page of that novel contains not just a green breast and a blue lawn but an old island that flowered once "for Dutch sailors' eyes." . THE AMAZING AERON .1-Year money back guarantee · FREE Shipping in the Continental U.S. · We Will NOT Be Undersold! 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